Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution

Chapter 6

Working with
Nanotechnology

The word manufacturing comes from the
Latin manufactus, meaning "handmade." Today, the
term brings to mind huge, noisy machines stamping out products
and spewing waste. Giving up manufactured products isn't popular
or practicalalmost everything we use today is manufactured.
If all machine-made products were to suddenly vanish, most people
in the United States would find themselves naked and outdoors,
with very little around them. Expanding manufacturing is an
objective of nearly every nation on Earth.

We can't give up manufacturing, but we can
replace today's technologies with something radically different. Molecular
manufacturing can help us get what we seem to want:
high-quality products made at low cost with little environmental
impact. Chapter 12 will describe the
grave problems raised by misapplication of this capability, but
for now we discuss the positive side.

What follows is an exploration of the
possiblea look at the devices that could be built once
precise molecular control is achieved, and a look at how people
might run a manufacturing business based on nanomachines. Try not to
think of these sketches as hard-and-fast predictions of precisely
how things will be done, but instead as descriptions of
capabilitiesthe sorts of things that can be done once nanotechnology is well in
hand. Doubtless there will be better ways to do things than the
ways we describe. As usual, references to the 1980s and before
are historically accurate; in the rest, the science isn't
fiction..

Scenario: Desert Rose
Industries

Desert Rose Industries is a diversified
wholesale manufacturer of enough furniture, computers, toys,
and recreation equipment to have made any twentieth-century
captain of industry proud. But if you assembled all Desert
Rose employees in front of corporate headquarters, you'd see
Carl and Maria Santos standing beside a building the size of
a four-bedroom house. This industrial giant is a typical
mom-and-pop business, helped along by a network of
telecommuters who handle sales and customer support from
homes scattered across North America.

Their friends chide Carl and Maria as
"old-fashioned traditionalists" and tease Maria
about abandoning Carl in the factory while she travels to
Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa for new business. In
the molecular-manufacturing business, familiar personal
skills and virtueshonesty, accuracy, good
communicationare as important as before. Maria likes to
work with the customers. Aided by her S.B. in molecular
manufacturing from MIT and her MFA in design, she patiently
helps nervous new designers through their first manufacturing
experience, and with unflagging courtesy and good humor,
handles rush orders, last-second changes, and special orders.
Maria's good design ideas and caring personality won them a
reputation for being responsive to customer needs. Carl,
precise and careful, built their name for accurate
manufacturing and delivery on schedule.

Except for Carl's habit of playing Gershwin
at full volume with the windows open, the only sounds at the
Desert Rose site are the birds along the banks of the stream
that winds across the canyon floor; no clanking machinery
here. Maria's parents built Desert Rose Industries out here
on an old smelter many miles away from human neighbors. They
regraded the land and cleaned up the wastes. Maria adapted a
molecular processor to convert heavy-metal contaminants back
into stable minerals, and shipped them off to help refill the
hole they had originally come from, an old open-pit mine. The
desert has mostly healed now, and a few tough trees are
spreading along the stream again.

New customers coming up the road for a
firsthand look at the manufacturing operations get the full
tour: a lunch/meeting room, Maria's office, the manufacturing
plant, and the warehouse space for parts and products out
back. "The plant" is the largest room, and Carl's
pride. Twelve manufacturing ponds and their cooling
systemsvats ranging in size from a kitchen sink to a
small swimming poolare where Desert Rose uses nanocomputers and assemblers to do their
building work. A plumbers' nightmare of piping runs between
the ponds and a triple row of containers with labels like
CARBON FEEDSTOCK, PREPARED PLATINUM, SIZE-4 STRUCTURAL
FIBERS, and PREFAB MOTORS. Carl keeps a good stock of parts
and raw materials on hand, with more in the underground
warehouse. Sure, some rare things almost never get used, but
having them ready to go is one of Carl's secrets for
delivering on time and building precisely to specification.
Over on a table are Carl's music system and the
computersdescendants of the IBM PCs and Macintoshes of
the 1980sthat are used to run the manufacturing
process. In a space the size of a large living room, Carl and
Maria have all the raw materials and all the production
equipmentnanocomputers and assemblersthey need
for building almost anything.

Occasionally, Carl and Maria need the
services of specialized tools, such as disassemblers, that
might exist only in labs. A disassembler works like an
archeologist, painstakingly excavating the structure of a molecule, removing atom after atom, in order to
record and analyze the molecular structure. Because they work
so slowly, noting the position of each molecule,
disassemblers aren't used for recycling operationsit
would be expensive and pointless to record all this unwanted
data. But as tools for analyzing the unknown, they're hard to
beat..

Maria found this out when a customer sent her
an order for tropically scented furniture and fixtures for
his restaurant, but instead of including the software
instructions for building the perfume, Maria found a plastic
bag full of resinous brown gook with a note saying, "I
got this stuff in the tropics. Please make the fabric smell
like this." Maria (after sniffing the gook and deciding
it smelled surprisingly tropically good) shipped the sample
to the lab for chemical analysis by disassembler. The lab
sent back software with the molecular description and
instructions for building the same scent into the furniture.

Carl usually schedules production very
tightly: in every tank, assemblers are building products;
every computer is directing work. But this morning, listening
to the tone of Maria's voice wafting in from the front
office, Carl changes his plans: something important is about
to happen. He postpones building orders for video wallpaper
and commemorative diamond baseballs, and holds three pools
and a computer ready. Minutes later, Maria hurries in, her
voice tight and anxious. "Carl, that earthquake down
souththey need help. Amanda from the Red Cross is
sending the software right now."

To build a product, Desert Rose needs design
instructionscomputer softwarefor the assemblers.
Carl and Maria have their own software library, but usually
they buy or rent what they need, or the customers send their
own designs.

The software that Amanda sends contains the
specifications to manufacture the emergency equipment: a set
of instructions to be run on a standard desktop computer.
Within minutes, two copies of the Red Cross software arrive
electronically. Before starting the build, Carl meticulously
checks to make sure that the master copy and backup copy
agree and weren't damaged in transit. If the instructions are
complete and correct and properly signed with the Red Cross
data stamp, then the desktop computer will communicate these
building instructions directly to millions of small computers
acting as on-the-job foremen directing the work:
nanocomputers.

Nanocomputers

While the first, primitive assemblers were
controlled by changing what molecules are in the solution
around the device, getting the speed and accuracy wanted for
large-scale manufacturing takes real computation. Carl's
setup uses a combination of special-purpose molecule
processors and general-purpose assemblers, all controlled and
orchestrated by nanocomputers.

Computers back in the 1990s used
microelectronics. They worked by moving electrical charge
back and forth through conducting pathswires, in
effectusing it to block and unblock the flow of charge
in other paths. With nanotechnology, computers are built from
molecular
electronics. Like the computers of the 1990s, they use
electronic signals to weave the patterns of digital logic.
Being made of molecular components, though, they are built on
a much smaller scale than 1990s computers, and work much
faster and more efficiently. On the scale of our simulated
molecular world, 1990s computer chips are like landscapes,
while nanocomputers are like individual buildings. Carl's
desktop PC contains over a trillion nanocomputers, enough to
out-compute all the microelectronic computers of the
twentieth century put together.

Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, an
exploratory engineer proposed that nanocomputers could be
mechanical, using sliding rods instead of moving electrons as
shown in Figure 8. These molecular mechanical computers were
much easier to design than molecular electronic computers
would have been. They were a big help in getting some idea of
what nanotechnology could do.

FIGURE 8: MECHANICAL TRANSISTOR

An electronic transistor (above) lets current flow when a
negative electric charge is applied and blocks current
when a positive charge is applied. The mechanical
"transistor" (below) lets the horizontal rod
move when the vertical rod is down, and blocks the
horizontal rod when the vertical rod is up. Either device
can be used to build logic gates and computers.

Even back then, it was pretty obvious
that mechanical computers would be slower than electronic
computers. Carl's molecular electronic PC would have been no
great surprise, though nobody knew just how to design one.
When nanotechnology actually arrived and people started
competing to build the best possible computers, molecular
electronics won the technology race. Still, mechanical
nanocomputers could have done all the nanocomputing
jobs at Desert Rose: ordinary, everyday molecular
manufacturing just doesn't demand the last word in computer
performance.

For Carl, the millions of nanocomputers in
the milky waters of his building ponds are just extensions of
machines on his desk, machines there to help him run his
business and deliver products to his customersor, in
the case of the Red Cross emergency, to help provide
time-critical emergency supplies. By reserving those three
separate ponds, Carl can either build three different kinds
of equipment for the Red Cross or use all the ponds to
mass-produce the first thing on the Red Cross list: emergency
shelters for ten thousand people. The software is ready, the
plumbing is fine, the drums of building materials are all
topped up, the Special Mix for this job is loaded: the build
is ready to start. "Okay," Carl tells the computer,
"build Red Cross tents." Computer talks to
nanocomputers. In all three pools, nanocomputers talk to
assemblers. The build begins.

Assembling Products

Some of the building done at Desert Rose
Industries uses assemblers much like the ones we saw in the
first hall of the plant tour, back in the simulated molecular
world of the Silicon Valley Faire. As seen in simulation,
they are big, slow, computer-controlled things moving
molecular tools. With the right instructions and machinery to
keep them supplied with molecular tools, these
general-purpose assemblers can build almost anything. They're
slow, though, and take a lot of energy to run. Some of the
building uses special-purpose assembly systems in the
molecule-processing style, like the systems in the basement
we saw in the tour of a simulated molecular factory. The
special-purpose systems are all moving belts and rollers, but
no arms. This is faster and more efficient, but for quantity
orders, cooling requirements limit the speed.

It's faster to use larger, prefabricated
building blocks. Desert Rose uses these for most of their
work, and especially for rush orders like the one Carl just
set up. Their underground warehouse has room-sized bins
containing upward of a thousand tons of the most popular
building blocks, things like structural fibers. They're made
at plants on the West Coast and shipped here by subway for
ready use. Other kinds are made on site using the
special-purpose assemblers. Carl's main room has several
cabinet-sized boxes hooked up to the plumbing, each taking in
raw materials, running them through this sort of specialized molecular machinery,
and pumping out a milky syrup of product. One syrup contains
motors, another one contains computers, and another is full
of microscopic plug-in light sources. All go into tanks for
later use.

Now they're being used. The mix for the Red
Cross tent job is mostly structural fiber stronger than the
old bulletproof-vest materials. Other building blocks also go
in, including motors, computers, and dozens of little struts,
angle brackets, and doohickies. The mix would look like
someone had stirred together the parts from a dozen toy sets,
if the parts were big enough to see. In fact, though, the
largest parts would be no more than blurry dots, if you saw
one under a normal optical microscope.

The mix also contains block-assemblers,
floating free like everything else. These machines are big,
about like an office building in our simulation view with the
standard settings. Each has several jointed arms, a computer,
and several plugs and sockets. These do the actual
construction work.

To begin the build, pumps pour the mix into a
manufacturing pond. The constant tumbling motions of
microscopic things in liquids would be too disorganized for
building anything so large as a tent, so the block-assemblers
start grabbing their neighbors. Within moments, they have
linked up to form a framework spread through the liquid. Now
that they are plugged together, they divide up jobs, and get
to work. Instructions pour in from Carl's desktop computer.

The block-assemblers use sticky grippers to
pull specific kinds of building blocks out of the liquid.
They use their arms to plug them together. For a permanent
job, they would be using blocks that bond together chemically
and permanently. For these temporary tents, though, the Red
Cross design uses a set of standard blocks that are put
together with amazingly ordinary fasteners: these blocks have
snaps, plugs, and screws, though of course the parts are
atomically perfect and the threads on the screws are single
helical rows of atoms. The resulting joints weaken the tent's
structure somewhat, but who cares? The basic materials are
almost a hundred times stronger than steel, so there is
strength to waste if it makes manufacturing more convenient.

Fiber segments snap together to make fabrics.
Some segments contain motors and computers, linked by fibers
that contain power and data cables. Struts snap together with
more motors and computers to make the tent's main structures.
Special surfaces are made of special building blocks. From
the human perspective, each tent is a lightweight structure
that contains most of the conveniences and comforts of an
apartment: cooking facilities, a bathroom, beds, windows, air
conditioning, specially modified to meet the environmental
demands of the quake-stricken country. From a builder's
perspective, especially from a nanomachine's point of view,
the tent is just structure slapped together from a few
hundred kinds of prefab parts.

In a matter of seconds, each block-assembler
has put together a few thousand parts, and its section of the
tent is done. In fact, the whole thing is done: many
trillions of hands make light work. A crane swings out over
the pond and starts plucking out tent packages as fresh mix
flows in.

Maria's concern has drawn her back to the
plant to see how the build is going. "It's coming
along," Carl reassures her. "Look, the first batch
of tents is out." In the warehouse, the first pallet is
already stacked with five layers of dove-gray
"suitcases": tents dried and packed for transport.
Carl grabs a tent by the handle and lugs it out the door. He
pushes a tab on the corner labeled "Open," and it
takes over a minute to unfold to a structure a half-dozen
paces on a side. The tent is big, and light enough to blow
away if it didn't cling to the ground so tightly. Maria and
Carl tour the tent, testing the appliances, checking the
construction of furniture: everything is extremely
lightweight compared to the bulk-manufactured goods of the
1990s, tough but almost hollow.

Like the other structures, the walls and
floors are full of tiny motors and struts controlled by
simple computers like the ones used in twentieth-century
cars, televisions, and pinball machines. They can unfold and
refold. They can also flex to produce sound like a
high-quality speaker, or to absorb sound to silence outdoors
racket. The whole three-room setup is small and efficient,
looking like a cross between a boat cabin and a Japanese
business hotel room. Outside, though, it is little more than
a box. Maria shakes her head, knowing full well what
architects can do these days when they try to make a building
really fit its site. Oh well, she thinks, These
won't be used for long.

"Well, that looks pretty good to
me," says Carl with satisfaction. "And I think
we'll be finished in another hour."

Maria is relieved. "I'm glad you had
those pools freed up so fast."

By three o'clock, they've shipped three
thousand emergency shelters, sending them by subway. Within
half an hour, tents are being set up at the disaster site.

Behind the Scenes and
Afterward

Desert Rose Industries and other
manufacturers can make almost anything quickly and at low
cost. That includes the tunneling machines and other
equipment that made the subway system they use for shipping.
Digging a tunnel from coast to coast now costs less than
digging a single block under New York City used to. It wasn't
expensive to get a deep-transit terminal installed in their
basement. Just as the tents aren't mere bundles of canvas,
these subways aren't slow things full of screeching, jolting
metal boxes. They're magnetically levitated to reach aircraft
speedsas experimental Japanese trains were in the late
1980smaking it easy for Carl and Maria to give their
customers quick service. There's still a road leading to the
plant, but nobody's driven a truck over it for years.

They only take in materials that they will
eventually ship out in products, so there's nothing left
over, and no wastes to dump. One corner of the plant is full
of recycling equipment. There are always some obsolete parts
to get rid of, or things that have been damaged and need to
be reworked. These get broken down into simpler molecules and
put back together again to make new parts.

The gunk in the manufacturing ponds is water
mixed with particles much finer than silt. The
particlesfasteners, computers, and the reststay
in suspension because they are wrapped in molecular jackets
that keep them there. This uses the same principle as
detergent molecules, which coat particles of oily dirt to
float them away.

Though it wouldn't be nutritious or
appetizing, you could drink the tent mix and be no worse for
it. To your body, the parts and their jackets, and even the
nanomachines, would be like so many bits of grit and sawdust.
(Grandma would have called it roughage.)

Carl and Maria get their power from solar
cells in the road, which is the only reason they bothered
having it paved. In back of their plant stands what looks
like a fat smokestack. All it produces, though, is an updraft
of clean, warm air. The darkly paved road, baking in the New
Mexico sun, is cooler than you might expect: it soaks up
solar energy and makes electricity, instead of just heat.
Once the power is used, it turns back into heat, which has to
go somewhere. So the heat rises from their cooling tower
instead of the road, and the energy does useful work on the
way.

Some products, like rocket engines, are made
more slowly and in a single piece. This makes them stronger
and more permanent. The tents, though, don't need to be
superstrong and are just for temporary use. A few days after
the tents go up, the earthquake victims start to move out
into new housing (permanent, better-looking, and very
earthquake resistant). The tents get folded and shipped off
for recycling.

Recycling things built this way is simple and
efficient: nanomachines just unscrew and unsnap the
connectors and sort the parts into bins again. The shipments
Desert Rose gets are mostly recycled to begin with. There's
no special labeling for recycled materials, because the
molecular parts are the same either way.

For convenience (and to keep the plant
small), Carl and Maria get most of their parts prefabricated,
even though they can make almost anything. They can even make
more production equipment. In one of their manufacturing
ponds, they can put together a new cabinet full of
special-purpose assemblers. They do this when they want to
make a new type of part in-house. Like parts, the
part-assemblers are made by special-purpose assemblers. Carl
can even make big vats in medium-size vats, unfolding them
like tents.

If Desert Rose Industries needed to double
capacity, Carl and Maria could do it in just a few days. They
did this once for a special order of stadium sections. Maria
got Carl to recycle the new building before its shadow hurt
their cactus garden.

Factory Factories

In the Desert Rose Industries scenario,
manufacturing has become cheap, fast, clean, and efficient. Using
fast, precise machines to handle matter in molecular pieces makes
it easy for nanotechnology to be fast, clean, and efficient. But
for it to be cheap, the manufacturing equipment has to be
cheap.

The Desert Rose scenario shows how this can work.
Molecular-manufacturing equipment can be used to make all the
parts needed to build more molecular manufacturing equipment. It
can even build the machines needed to put the parts together.
This resembles an idea developed by NASA for a self-expanding
manufacturing complex on the Moon, but made faster and simpler
using molecular machines and parts.

Replicators

In the early days of nanotechnology, there won't
be as many different kinds of machines as there are at Desert
Rose. One way to build a lot of molecular manufacturing equipment
in a reasonable time would be to make a machine that can be used
to make a copy of itself, starting with special but simple
chemicals. A machine able to do this is called a "replicator." With a
replicator and a pot full of the right fuel and raw materials,
you could start with one machine, then have two, four, eight, and
so on.

This doubling process soon makes enough machines
to be useful. The replicatorseach including a computer to
control it and a general-purpose assembler to build
thingscould then be used to make something else, like the
tons of specialized machines needed to set up a Desert Rose
manufacturing plant. At that point, the replicators could be
discarded in favor of those more efficient machines.

Replicators are worth a closer look, though,
because they show how quickly molecular manufacturing systems can
be used to build more manufacturing equipment. Figure 9 shows a
design described in Stanford University course CS 404 in the
spring of 1988. If we were in one of our standard simulation
views, the submicroscopic device at the top of the picture would
be like a huge tank, three stories tall when lying on its side.
Most of its interior is taken up by a tape memory system that
tells how to move the arm to build all the parts of the
replicator, except the tape itself. The tape gets made by a
special tape-copying machine. At the right-hand end of the
replicator are pores for bringing in fuel and raw-material
molecules, and machinery for processing them. In the middle are
computer-controlled arms, like the ones we saw on the plant trip.
These do most of the actual construction.

FIGURE 9: REPLICATOR

A replicator would be able to build copies of itself when
supplied with fuel and raw materials. In the diagram, (A)
contains a nanocomputer, (B) a library of stored
instructions, (C) contains machinery that takes in fuel and
produces electric power, (D) is a motor, and (E) contains
machinery that prepares raw materials for use. (All volumes
follow calculations presented in a class at Stanford.) The
lower diagrams illustrate steps in a replication cycle,
showing how the working space is kept isolated from the
external liquid, which provides the needed fuel and
raw-material molecules. Replicators of this sort are useful
as thought experiments to show how nanomachines can product
more nanomachines, but specialized manufacturing equipment
would be more efficient in practice.

The steps in the cycleusing a copy to block
the tube, beginning a fresh copy, then releasing the old
oneillustrate one way for a machine to build a copy of
itself while floating in a liquid, yet doing all its construction
work inside, in vacuum. (It's easier to design for vacuum, and
this is exploratory-engineering work, so easier design is better
design.) Calculations suggest that the whole construction cycle
can be completed in less than a quarter hour, since the
replicator contains about a billion atoms, and each arm can
handle about a million atoms per second. At that rate, one device
can double and double again to make trillions in about ten hours.

Each replicator just sits in a chemical bath,
soaking up what it needs and making more replicators. Eventually,
either the special chemicals run out or other chemicals are added
to signal them to do something else. At that point, they can be
reprogrammed to produce anything else you please, so long as it
can be extruded from the front. The products can be long, and can
unfold or be pieced together to make larger objects, so the size
of these initial replicatorssmaller than a
bacteriumwould be only a temporary limitation.

General Assemblers

From the molecular manipulators
and primitive assemblers described in the last chapter, the most
likely path to nanotechnology leads to assemblers with more and
more general capabilities. Still, efficiency favors
special-purpose machines, and the Desert Rose scenario didn't
make much use of general assemblers. Why bother making
general-purpose assemblers in the first place?

To see the answer, turn the question around and
ask, Why not build such a tool? There is nothing
outstandingly difficult about a general assembler, as molecular
machinery goes. It will just be a device with good, flexible
positional control and a system to feed it a variety of molecular
tools. This is a useful, basic capability. General-purpose
assemblers could always be replaced by a lot of specialized
devices, but to build those specialized devices in the first
place, it makes sense to come up with a more flexible,
general-purpose system that can just be reprogrammed.

So, general purpose machines are likely to find
use in making short production runs of more specialized devices. Ralph Merkle, a computers and
security expert at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, sees this as
paralleling the way manufacturing works today: "General
purpose devices could do many tasks, but they'll do them
inefficiently. For any given task, there will be one or a few
best ways of doing it, and one or a few special purpose devices
that are finely tuned to do that one task. Nails aren't made by a
general-purpose machine shop, they're made by nail-making
machines. Making nails with a general-purpose machine shop would
be more expensive, more difficult, and more time-consuming.
Likewise, in the future we won't see a proliferation of
general-purpose self-replicating systems, we'll see
specialization for almost every task."

What Will These
Capabilities Make Possible?

We've surveyed a lot of devices: assemblers of
various flavors, nanocomputers, disassemblers, replicators, and
others. What's important about these is not the exact
distinctions between them, but the capabilities that they will
give and the effects they will have on human lives. Again, we are
suspending discussion of potential misapplications until later.

If we tease apart the implications of what we've
seen in the Desert Rose scenario, we can analyze some of the key
impacts of molecular manufacturing in industry, science, and
medicine.

Technology and Industry

At its base, nanotechnology is about molecular
manufacturing, and manufacturing is the basis of much of today's
industry. This is why Desert Rose made a good starting point for
describing the possibilities of a nanotechnological world. From
an industrial perspective, it makes sense to think of
nanotechnology in terms of products and production.

New Products: Today, we handle matter
crudely, but nanotechnology will bring thorough control of the
structure of matter, the ability to build objects to atom-by-atom
specifications. This means being able to make almost anything. By
comparison, even today's range of products will feel very
limited. Nanotechnology will make possible a huge range of new
products, a range we can't envision today. Still, to get a feel
for what is possible, we can look at some easily imagined
applications.

Reliable Products: Today, products often
fail, but for failures to occurfor a wing to fall off an
airplane, or a bearing to wear outa lot of atoms have to be
out of place. In the future, we can do better. There are two
basic reasons for this: better materials and better quality
control, both achieved by molecular manufacturing. By using
materials tens of times stronger than steel, as Desert Rose did,
it will be easy to make things that are very strong, with a huge
safety margin. By building things with atom-by-atom control,
flaws can be made very rare and extremely smallnonexistent,
by present standards.

With nanotechnology, we can design in big safety
margins and then manufacture the design with near-perfection. The
result will be products that are tough and reliable. (There will
still be room for bad designs, and for people who wish to take
risks in machines that balance on the edge of disaster.)

Intelligent Products: Today, we make most
things from big chunks of metal, wood, plastic, and the like, or
from tangles of fibers. Objects made with molecular manufacturing
can contain trillions of microscopic motors and computers,
forming parts that work together to do something useful. A
climber's rope can be made of fibers that slide around and
reweave to eliminate frayed spots. Tents can be made of parts
that slide and lock to turn a package into a building. Walls and
furniture can be made to repair themselves, instead of passively
deteriorating.

On a mundane level, this sort of flexibility will
increase reliability and durability. Beyond this, it will make
possible new products with abilities we never imagined we needed
so badly. And beyond even this, it will open new possibilities
for art.

Inexpensive Production: Today, production
requires a lot of labor, either for making things or for building
and maintaining machines that make things. Labor is expensive,
and expensive machines make automation expensive, too. In the
Desert Rose scenario, we got a glimpse of how molecular
manufacturing can make production far less expensive than it is
today. This is perhaps the most surprising conclusion about
nanotechnology, so we'll take a closer look at it in the next
chapter.

Clean Production: Today, our manufacturing
processes handle matter sloppily, producing pollution. One step
puts stuff where it shouldn't be; the next washes it off the
product and into the water supply. Our transportation system
worsens the problem as unreliable trucks and tankers spill
noxious chemicals over the land and sea. Everything is expensive,
so companies skimp on even the half-effective pollution controls
that we know how to build.

Nanotechnology will mean greater control of
matter, making it easy to avoid pollution. This means that a
little public pressure will go a long way toward a cleaner
environment. Likewise, it will make it easy to increase
efficiency and reduce resource requirements. Products, like the
Red Cross tents at Desert Rose, can be made of snap-together,
easily recyclable parts. Sophisticated products could even be
made from biodegradable materials. Nanotechnology will make it
easy to attack the causes of pollution at their technological
root.

Nanotechnology will have great applications in
the field of industry, much as transistors had great applications
in the field of vacuum tube electronics, and democracy had great
applications in the field of monarchy. It will not so much advance
twentieth-century industry as replace itnot all
at once, but during a thin slice of historical time.

Science

Chemistry: Today, chemists work with huge
number of molecules and study them using clever, indirect
techniques. Making a new molecule can be a major project, and
studying it can be another. Molecular manufacturing will help
chemists make what they want to study, and it will help them make
the tools they need to study it. Nanoinstruments will be used to
prod, measure, and modify molecules in a host of ways, studying
their structures, behaviors, and interactions.

Materials: Today, materials scientists
make new superconductors, semiconductors, and structural
materials by mixing and crushing and baking and freezing, and so
forth. They dream of far more structures than they can make, and
they stumble across more things than they plan. With molecular
manufacturing, materials science can be much more systematic and
thorough. New ideas can be tested because new materials can be
built according to plan (rather than playing around, groping for
a recipe).

This need not rule out unexpected discoveries,
since experimentseven blind searcheswill go much
faster. A few tons of raw materials would be enough to make a
billion samples, each a cubic micron in size. In all of history
so far, materials scientists have never tested so many materials.
With nanoinstruments and nanocomputers, they could. One
laboratory could then do more than all of today's materials
scientists put together.

Biology: Today, biologists use a host of
molecular devices borrowed from biology to study biology. Many of
these can be viewed as molecular machines. Nanotechnology will
greatly advance biology by providing better molecular devices,
better nanoinstruments. Some cells
have already been mapped in amazing molecular detail, but biology
still has far to go. With nanoinstruments (including
molecule-by-molecule disassemblers), biologists will at last be
able to map cells completely and study their interactions in
detail. It will become easy not only to find molecules in cells,
but to learn what they do. This will help in understanding
disease and the molecular requirements for health, enormously
advancing medicine.

Computation: Today, computers range from a
million to a billion times faster than an old desktop adding
machine, and the results have been revolutionary for science.
Every year, more questions can be answered by calculations based
on known principles of physics. The advent of
nanocomputerseven slow, miserable, mechanical
nanocomputerswill give us practical machines with a trillion
times the power of today's computers (essentially by letting us
package a trillion computers in a small space, without gobbling
too much money or energy.) The consequences will again be
revolutionary.

Physics: The known principles of physics
are adequate for understanding molecules, materials, and cells,
but not for understanding phenomena on a scale that would still
be submicroscopic if atoms were the size of marbles.
Nanotechnology can't help here directly, but it can provide
manufacturing facilities that will make huge particle
accelerators economical, where today they strain national
budgets.

More generally, nanotechnology will help science
wherever precision and fine details are important. Science
frequently proceeds by trying small variations in almost
identical experiments, comparing the results. This will be easier
when molecular manufacturing can make two objects that are
identical, molecule by molecule. In some areas, today's
techniques are not only crude, but destructive. Archaeological
sites are unique records of the human past, but today's
techniques throw away most information during the dig, by
accident. Future archaeologists, able to sift soil not speck by
speck but molecule by molecule, will be grateful indeed to those
archaeologists who today leave some ground undisturbed.

Medicine

Of all the areas where the ability to manufacture
new tools is important, medicine is perhaps the greatest. The
human body is intricate, and that intricacy extends beyond the
range of human vision, beyond microscopic imaging, down to the
molecular scale. "Molecular
medicine" is an increasingly popular term today, but
medicine today has only the simplest of molecular tools. As
biology uses nanoinstruments to learn about disease and health,
we will learn the physical requirements for restoring and
maintaining health. And with this knowledge will come the tools
needed to satisfy those requirementstools ranging from
improved pharmaceuticals to devices able to repair cells and
tissues through molecular
surgery.

Advanced medicine will be among the most complex
and difficult applications of nanotechnology. It will require
great knowledge, but nanoinstruments will help gather this
knowledge. It will pose great engineering challenges, but
computers of trillionfold greater power will help meet those
challenges. It will solve medical problems on which we spend
billions of dollars today, in hopes of modest improvements.

Today, modern medicine often means an expensive
way to prolong misery. Will nanomedicine be more of the same? Any
reader over the age of, say, thirty knows how things start to go
wrong: an ache here, a wrinkle there, the loss of an ability.
Over the decades, the physical quality of life declines faster
and fasterthe limits of what the body can do become
stricteruntil the limits are those of a hospital bed. The
healing abilities we have when young seem to fade away. Modern
medical practice expends the bulk of its effort on such things as
intensive care units, dragging out the last few years of life
without restoring health.

Truly advanced medicine will be able to restore
and supplement the youthful ability to heal. Its cost will depend
on the cost of producing things more intricate than any we have
seen before, the cost of producing computers, sensors, and the
like by the trillions. To understand the prospects for medicine,
like those for science and industry, we need to take a closer
look at the cost of molecular manufacturing.